


Between Thieves

by LookingForDroids



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: Ancestor-Era (Homestuck), Gen, POV Second Person, Unexpected Mercy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28176849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Long before the game takes place, two outcasts meet in an Alternian prison.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Between Thieves

The first and only time you were captured, they tried to feed you to a monster in the darkness.

That’s what they said, at least – the legislacerator who liked to rattle his cane along the bars of your cage as he walked past, the guard who jabbed you with the business end of her shockstick every time you looked like you were trying to concentrate, the other prisoners with their fearmongering gossip. They’ve got a _thing_ trapped down there beneath the prison, and it eats trolls. But alongside your beast-sense, you’ve got a weaker awareness of sapient minds, and when they threw you down into the dank basement and the trapdoor closed above you, it wasn’t a monster that you heard shuffling along the wall, dragging a chain with every step. It was a person.

“Wait,” you said. Not a plea. That was important. Not a command, either. Just something one troll might say to another, polite and without fear. 

She waited. There was no light to see by, but you felt the shape of her mind, heavy with misery and a pain so thick that even you could sense it – but then, trolls and beasts and monsters all hurt the same way, in the end.

“You get five minutes,” she rasped.

“You want to get out of here?”

There was the sound of laughter, dry until it dissolved into a wracking cough.

“Sure,” she said, and clanked her chain against the floor. “Got a key?”

“I can pick that lock, if you’ll let me close. After that... give me an hour.”

The lockpick you had was a crude, fragile one, a thin little shard of chitin from your last meal that you’d palmed and hidden in the hem of your shirt, but the lock was crude and fragile too. She stayed still while you tested the mechanism, working each tumbler carefully into place. You were never prone to rages, even back then, but you could hear the rattle of her breath as you worked, and smell the stink of illness untreated and a body too long unwashed, and you understood what it was that drove trolls to fits of killing fury. You pushed it aside with a muttered curse. It would help no one to act with too much force, and break your lockpick in the process. You needed to move quickly if you wanted to get out alive.

After the manacle fell from her ankle, you sat back against the damp wall and did what you couldn’t do with the wardens watching. You closed your eyes, slowed your breathing, and let your senses spread out until your thoughts were thin and far-ranging. Beyond the prison walls, the world you could sense was colorless, featureless, but it wasn’t empty; from the desert to the distant city, animal minds glowed like lights through fog.

No one ever thinks of their lusus as a beast. They’re too close to trollkind, you’ve heard it claimed, too keen of mind to be merely animal – but animal is what they are, as much as any of the flying or crawling things trolls take it as their right to hunt, and that means you can reach them. Like all beasts, they have their drives, and you understood enough of them that you had no need to compel, only to reach past hunger and territorial aggression for the simple instinct to protect. There were trolls, you projected, charges like their own, trapped in a bad place and in need of rescuing. 

From the quiet of your prison you sent your message out, broadcasting through the ether like a radio signal, and one by one, they answered: sharp-fanged cats and heavy-shouldered hoofbeasts with coats of gleaming white, armor-plated slitherbeasts, insect swarms rising from the psionic slums and rangy desert barkbeasts that even as lusii ran in packs. On the far edge of your awareness, one of the bluebloods in the city had a centaur, strong enough to snap chains and massive from a lifetime of growth. That towering monster was only one of the snarling, squawking, stampeding horde that descended, but he was the one that dug his blunt fingers into the ground and tore the trapdoor from the floor above you in a shower of stone fragments and dust. 

You hadn’t been the feared Marauder then, just a kid who didn’t want to live and die in servitude. That jailbreak was the first part of your legend, but there’s a piece of it that you’ve never heard told – though people do wonder how so many of the guards died so quickly that night, without wounds and in such fear. There are only two trolls who _could_ know of it, and one of them is you. The other –

The light of the moons poured through the hole overhead where the trapdoor had been, and for the first time, you saw the prisoner who had let you live. Her face was eyeless and ravaged, crusted with her own blood and half-hidden by a shaggy curtain of filthy hair, but when you saw her clearly, she seemed was no older than you. Younger, maybe, and for one scant instant after the ceiling fell, she looked like it. You saw her turn her face up toward the cool breeze blowing from above and smile like no one was watching, and you almost asked if she wanted to come with you.

Before you could, she seemed to shrink in on herself again, wrapping her ragged arms around herself as a shiver passed through her. She looked in your direction, unerring despite her blindness, and said, “You’re closer than the guards are. Better run.”

And you had – stumbling out of the prison and back to open sky, breathing in great, desperate lungfuls of clean air and forcing your strut pods to carry you until you could pull yourself up onto the back of your own barkfiend lusus and race through the desert together. Above you, both moons hung full and bright, lighting your way, calling you on across the sands to freedom. Something about their position relative to the horizon nagged at you, but it wasn’t until you stopped to camp in the shelter of a stony overhang that you realized what it was. It was getting on morning, the stars already fading as the sky lightened from deep indigo to pale dawning. You’ve always had a sense for time, and too much of it had passed, by your reckoning, from the moment they threw you down to the moment you broke your chains.

She hadn’t given you one hour. She’d given you two.


End file.
